Nix That: 5 Top Retracted Science Papers of 2014

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Publish or perish, that's the motto in academia. Or is that
publish and perish? For researchers, the race to have their work
printed in peer-reviewed science journals can be messy — and
sometimes, some of them sacrifice integrity in the process.

Later, they find they did this only to be embarrassed by a
retraction of their work.

A study published in 2013 in the journal PLOS ONE found that
retractions are on the rise, although the researchers couldn't
determine why. The phenomenon may be due to a lower barrier to
publishing; for example, so-called "predatory" online journals
guarantee publication regardless of quality — for a price. But
still, many recent retractions stem from fraudulent, rather than
sloppy, science.

Live Science continues its year-end tradition with a list of five
notable retractions and questionable scientific publications from
2014.

5. D'oh! The authors are cartoon characters

The fact that Maggie Simpson could get a scientific paper
accepted for publication is remarkable for two reasons: She's
only a year old, and she is also a fictional cartoon character.

Yes, it's that Maggie Simpson, from the animated television
series "The Simpsons." Maggie teamed up with Edna Krabappel, Bart
Simpson's chain-smoking, man-crazy schoolteacher (who, in fact,
officially died in March 2014), as well as the fictitious Kim
Jong Fun to co-author a gibberish-laden math paper titled
'''Fuzzy', Homogeneous Configurations."

The paper was accepted by two journals, the Aperito Journal of
Nanoscience Technology and the Journal of Computational
Intelligence and Electronic Systems.

Alex Smolyanitsky of the National Institute of Standards and
Technology was the one who actually penned the articles, and he
did so to highlight the ease with which scientists can publish
their research, for a fee, in predatory journals. These journals
spam scientists and offer to publish their work, regardless of
the quality, without legitimate peer review.

Smolyanitsky in fact wrote the paper with a
random-text generator. The abstract, in its entirety, reads:
"The Ethernet must work. In this paper, we confirm the
improvement of e-commerce. WEKAU, our new methodology for
forward-error correction, is the solution to all of these
challenges."

Earlier this year, the International Journal of Advanced Computer
Technology accepted a paper submitted by an Australian computer
scientist that was far easier to understand, titled "Get Me Off
Your F... Mailing List." The paper comprised this seven-word
sentence, without the "... ," printed
over and over for 10 pages ), complete with a flowchart and
graph with the same message.

The prestigious Karolinska Institute in Sweden is trying to
determine what exactly happened during a procedure called a
radical artificial trachea surgery, performed by thoracic surgeon
Paolo Macchiarini.

Macchiarini's windpipe surgery on three patients at a Karolinska
Institute hospital was lauded as revolutionary and
made headlines around the world in 2011. The technique
involved removing the patient's diseased windpipe and replacing
it with a plastic one coated in stem cells. Drugs were then
administered to encourage growth of new tissue.

Two of the patients have since died, though, and the third
requires constant hospitalization so that nurses can clean out
her airway every four hours.

Karolinska Institute is now investigating. According to
complaints filed against Macchiarini, only one of the three
patients signed a consent form for the operation, and that form
was dated more than two weeks after the surgery. Also, soon after
the surgeries, one of Macchiarini's papers, published in the
Annals of Thoracic Surgery, was retracted for plagiarism.
Independent of this, Macchiarini was reportedly arrested in Italy
on charges of fraud and extortion.

In November 2014, The New York Times reported that Macchiarini's
paper about these surgeries in the medical journal The Lancet is
also being investigated. The complaint is that Macchiarini didn't
divulge any major complications the patients experienced in the
five months following the surgery, yet according to the
investigation, one patient (who ultimately died) required a stent
to be placed in the artificial windpipe to keep it open.

The investigation is expected to be complete in January 2015.
Macchiarini, who hails from Italy, is now performing his surgery
in Krasnodar, Russia, and insists that accusations of fraud and
malpractice are unfounded.

Dr. Mehmet Oz thought green coffee extract was miraculous.
Indeed, the celebrity doctor had no qualms promoting the
weight-loss potion as "magic" on his afternoon television show in
2012.

Alas, the magic must have worn off. In September 2014, the
Texas-based Applied Food Sciences, Inc., makers of green
coffee extract, settled with the Federal Trade Commission to
the tune of $3.5 million for using what the FTC described as a
"hopelessly flawed" study to make "baseless weight-loss claims."

One month later, the authors of the aforementioned hopelessly
flawed study, who were paid by Applied Food Sciences, Inc., to
write the paper in 2012, had no choice but to retract it from the
journal Diabetes, Metabolic Syndrome and Obesity: Targets and
Therapy. The FTC charged that the study's lead investigator
altered the weights and other key measurements of the
participants in the study, and committed numerous other
scientific sins.

Oz himself has been mum about the incident. According to an
article in the Washington Post on Oct. 22, 2014, "Oz's Web site
has been entirely scrubbed of almost every mention of the green
coffee extract, including the episode touting the product."

But here's what Oz said on his show back in 2012: "You may think
magic is make-believe, but this little bean has scientists saying
they found a magic weight-loss cure for every body type. ... This
is very exciting, and it's breaking news."

Yes, breaking news, as in published by paid researchers in an
obscure journal and announced on an afternoon talk show.
Fortunately for Oz, he hasn't been embarrassed by other
retractions concerning the dubious information he relays about
weight loss, anti-aging and miracle cures. Then again, most of
that stuff hasn't been published.

2. Vaccines still don't cause autism

According to the website Natural News, the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention has knowingly covered up scientific
evidence linking the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine to
autism.

Natural News got that tip from CDC whistleblower William Thompson
and reported it in early August 2014.

Around the same time, and apparently related to Thompson's
claims, anti-vaccine researcher Brian Hooker published an article
in the journal Translational Neurodegeneration claiming that
black children are at substantially increased risk for autism
after early exposure to the MMR vaccine.

The paper was titled "Measles-mumps-rubella vaccination timing
and autism among young African American boys: a reanalysis of CDC
data," and Hooker was the sole author. As Thompson explained in a
public statement on August 27, he had been talking to Hooker
about CDC studies.

With these new revelations, the anti-vaccine crowd once again
thought they had proof that vaccines cause autism. But by the end
of August, Translational Neurodegeneration removed the paper from
its Web site, citing "serious concerns about the validity of its
conclusions." By October the journal retracted the paper in full,
citing "undeclared competing interests on the part of the author"
and "concerns about the validity of the methods and statistical
analysis."

In other words, the journal editors thought that whatever Thomson
found wasn't statistically valid and he may have had some kind of
point to prove.

The incident may sound similar to the infamous article in The
Lancet by Andrew Wakefield, which started the whole
vaccines-causes-autism scare. But Wakefield's paper, also now
retracted, was found to be based on falsified data, not simply
weak statistics.

Nevertheless, while Thomson's paper has been retracted, the
publicity its initial publication generated has not.

1. The STAP that wouldn't stop

So many retractions in 2014 could vie for top honors. There's
pure irony (the paper "Ethics and Integrity of the Publishing
Process: Myths, Facts, and a Roadmap," retracted because of
plagiarism); there's shame (U.S. Sen. John Walsh had his master's
degree from Army War College revoked upon the revelation that he
plagiarized major portions of his thesis); and there's sheer
volume (former University of Tokyo researcher Shigeaki Kato has
retracted more than 30 papers, many in top journals, after using
faked images).

But the highest-profile retraction in 2014 has been the dual
studies published in January in Nature on a technique called STAP
(stimulus-triggered acquisition of pluripotency), which is a
proposed method for creating multipurpose stem cells from
ordinary cells. Although lead scientist Haruko Obokata claimed it
was a simple technique — placing mouse blood cells in a mildly
acidic solution — no one could reproduce the work ... not even
Obokata herself.

One by one, the co-authors began to
question Obokata's lead as allegations rose about data
manipulation. Nature retracted the papers in July, and the
fallout has been intense. The institute where Obokata works, the
prestigious RIKEN in Japan, was internationally disgraced. RIKEN
deputy director and Nature co-author Yoshiki Sasai committed
suicide. Obokata, meanwhile, continues to believe her method
works, although she has been found guilty of research misconduct.

Researchers elsewhere are asking how Nature could publish work
that seemed so obviously flawed. The journals Cell and Science
rejected the work for lack of data to support the bold claims.
Nature passed on publication early in 2013 but agreed to a
revised submission by the year's end.

The deeper, soul-searching question is how so many senior
scientists could so eagerly co-author a paper with methodology
questioned from the get-go and which could have been resolved by
merely reproducing the work themselves before publication. As
Carl
Sagan once said, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary
evidence."